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stopping by

(for poet Robert Frost who died in 1963)

the wind blew

his hair across his face,

as he squinted, snowblind,

in the brilliant cold of early January

and tried to tame the pages

and his eyes,

the world waiting for his new words,

his inaugural poem

for our fair young prince,

who we would lose

later the same year

frost left us;

the wind blew sparks of hope

into all eyes,

that day in 1961,

when frost, unable to see

in the snow glare,

recited, instead, from memory

“the gift outright”:

“the land was ours

before we were the land’s...”

the wind blows the old dream

across the face of despair,

the dream that was ours before

we were the dream’s,

some hollow melody

skips across the road we took

that led us to this precipice,

where we are still

at the edge of the woods

gazing up at the falling snow.